Sustainability, Volume 6, Issue 8

Increasing energy efficiency and exploiting energy saving potential are two important practices that can help to ensure future energy security in China. This paper proposes a new total factor energy efficiency indicator, based on the directional met...

Global warming has been increasingly concerning, and international society has been taking various measures to mitigate this issue. Since the electric vehicle has important and generally beneficial impacts on environment protection, grid construction...

Marble is a natural material, used in the construction field since antiquity. It has always been used to communicate monumentality and solidity. Nowadays new technologies permit marble to express new languages: particularly, translucent marble techn...

The framework for life cycle sustainability analysis (LCSA) developed within the project CALCAS (Co-ordination Action for innovation in Life-Cycle Analysis for Sustainability) is introducing a truly integrated approach for sustainability studies. How...

In this paper, we analyse the financial viability and economic sustainability implications of government programs for the development of renewable energy sources, explicitly considering that consumers take environmental issues into account. We envisa...

Industrial pollution accounts for a large proportion of global pollution, and in the European Union, an integrated pollution and prevention approach based on individual performance standards has been implemented to regulate emissions from industrial...

Green infrastructure ameliorates the urban heat island effect, contributes positively to liveability and enables sustainability in higher density urban environments. Greenskins (living architectures) are a more specific form of green infrastructure,...

Since the prolonged, severe smog that blanketed many Chinese cities in first months of 2013, living in smog has become “normal” to most people living in mainland China. This has not only caused serious harm to public health, but also resulted in mass...

Many studies in Italy showed that buildings are responsible for about 40% of total energy consumption, due to worsening performance of building envelope; in fact, a great number of Italian buildings were built before the 1970s and 80s. In particular,...

Residential buildings built after the Second World War have high energy consumption and inadequate thermal comfort, especially in summer conditions, largely attributable to the high transmittance of windows and lack of effective shading devices. Perf...

The principle of multiresolution segmentation was represented in detail in this study, and the canny algorithm was applied for edge-detection of a remotely sensed image based on this principle. The target image was divided into regions based on objec...

Nowadays it is possible to employ several software packages to evaluate building’s energy performance, each of them based on a different calculation code, with different boundary conditions in terms of environmental temperature, solar radiation, wind...

Based on regional coordination theory and system theory, the authors constructed an evaluation index system for the coordinated development of a regional environment-tourism-economy system with a pressure-state-response (PSR) model. With a coordinate...

Biorefinery aims at designing new virtuous and high-efficiency energy chains, achieving the combined production of biofuels (e.g., bioethanol) and biobased products. This emerging philosophy can represent an important opportunity for the industrial w...

Alternative methods to animal testing are considered as promising tools to support the prediction of toxicological risks from environmental exposure. Among the alternative testing methods, the cell transformation assay (CTA) appears to be one of the...

With the process of globalization, many political geographers and research institutions have begun to focus on borders and border areas. Faced with the current debate on the border policies, this paper reviews the former research relating to border s...

Since the early 1990s, sustainable forest management (SFM) has emerged as a paradigm of forest management on global, regional and national levels. In developing countries, avoiding deforestation is a preliminary step towards SFM. The Korean peninsula...

The study reviewed developmental challenges confronting African countries with specific reference to the availability of potable water, sanitation, energy, water and ambient air. It showed the conflict between the need to exploit environmental capita...

In this paper, emergy analysis is used in association with the ternary diagrams and geographic information system (GIS) tools to improve the evaluation of sustainability for the Pan-Pearl River Delta (PPRD) region. Emergy accounting of PPRD is estima...

With rapid development since the 1970s, China is entering a period of social transformation, which not only creates favorable conditions for sustainable development but also presents new challenges. The transitional period in China is a stage in whic...

Cycle time management plays an important role in improving the performance of a wafer fabrication factory. It starts from the estimation of the cycle time of each job in the wafer fabrication factory. Although this topic has been widely investigated,...

Companies are increasingly conducting life cycle assessments (LCA) of their products to understand potential product impacts on the environment, prioritize areas of innovation to create more sustainable products, and determine valid claims. This case...

This paper applies the pressure-state-response (PSR) model to establish environmental quality indices for 30 administrative regions in China from 2003 to 2011 and employs panel data analysis to study the relationships among the urbanization rate, eco...

This article is an overview of the current situation as well as future prospects for biogas production in rural plants in Poland. Our research has focused on the management of agricultural waste. While Poland’s agriculture and its local food industry...

Sustainable tourism has the potential of contributing to local development while protecting the natural environment and preserving cultural heritage. Implementation of this form of tourism requires human resources that can assume effective leadership...

China has both mandatory and voluntary individual account pensions that are provided through the government. The experience of China makes a particularly interesting case study concerning the functioning of individual accounts in that its mandatory i...

Rice forage systems can increase the land use efficiency in paddy fields, improve the self-sufficient feed ratio, and provide environmental benefits for agro-ecosystems. This system often decreased economic benefits compared with those through import...

We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the norm-activation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability. Our case study is commercial cattle farming in semi-arid...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used to improve the environmental performance of food systems and simplification of LCA appears to be a vital question, especially for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Following a literatur...

Electric universal service aims to improve the individual living quality in remote and underdeveloped areas, the implementation of which can promote the sustainable development of people’s lives and the local economy to some extent. A social welfare...

The scope of this chapter is to calculate the net energy of the production chain for virgin olive oil. Therefore, the determination was carried out for the direct and indirect energy inputs and the energy present as feedstock in the outputs (products...

This paper presents the Gompertz function of per capita GDP and vehicle stock to forecast the vehicle ownership of China through to 2050 against a background of increasing energy use and CO₂ emissions associated with the potential demands of on-road...

Industrial Ecology (IE) is based on the relation between the natural ecosystem and economic ecosystem. The concept refers to the metaphorical relation between the natural and industrial ecosystems as a model for transforming unsustainable industrial...

To address worsening urban traffic and environmental issues, planners and policy makers in China have begun to recognize the importance of shaping vehicle use through the built environment. However, very few studies can be found that examine the rela...

This study develops a sustainable housing model for the Mosquitia region of Honduras, aimed at improving the living conditions of indigenous communities and reducing their vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The improved housing efficienc...

The game model of sewage charges, based on incremental mode, was developed. Four modes of high/low sewage charge standards were utilized to analyze the relationship between control strategy on sewage discharge and the development of environmental pro...

Rapid industrialization, as one of the main driving forces promoting sustainable economic growth, has increased the area of industrial land use significantly. Industrial land use manifests that the competition between it and other kinds of land use i...

Social well-being and social justice are meant to create a positive outcome meaningful for people and societies. According to the guidelines of social life cycle assessment, especially well-being should be considered as the main area of protection to...

In today’s rapidly changing environment, semiconductor manufacturers compete more in the area of modular production networks. However, the instability of semiconductor modular production networks can to a large extent lead to the failure of these net...

The Upper Yangtze River Basin comprises a densely-populated agricultural region with mountainous and hilly landforms. Intensive cultivation has been extended onto steep hillslopes, which constitute the principal source area for sediment production. S...

In this work, an experimental and modeling analysis of the adsorption of four aromatic compounds (i.e., toluene, naphthalene, o-xylene and ethylbenzene) onto a commercial activated carbon is carried out. The aim is to assess the suitability of the...

The relationship between consumption and deprivation has been explored at various scales in the literature. It would be expected that increased deprivation leads to less consumption and vice versa. However, what is the form of that relationship? Evid...

Most of the world’s population lives in urban areas and in inefficient buildings under the energy point of view. Starting from these assumptions, there is the need to identify methodologies and innovations able to improve social development and the q...

Passive solutions for building energy efficiency represent an interesting research focus nowadays. In particular, natural materials are widely investigated for their potential intrinsic high thermal energy and environmental performance. In this view,...

Relatively little attention has been paid to examining the spatial expansion features of cities at various tiers at the regional level in China, especially those located in central and western regions of the country. Based on Landsat satellite imager...